gastropoda

Among the uncountable pleasures of being able to walk for blocks again is coming across street-level creativity in a city increasingly clogged with above-ground Subways. The other day I passed a Jamaican cart with different sizes of styrofoam trays attached alongside the takeout window, including “Charming, polite, little girl” and “Strong, healthy man.” Guess which one was bigger and more expensive? Clearly, the vendor was a woman who knows from dainty eaters — or at least from scarf-and-barfers.

Had a drink the other afternoon with a lovely friend in from Italy for a couple of months and, as always, he was full of sharp observations. He wanted prosecco but the bar had only cava and when I repeated, “Spanish prosecco,” his head almost swiveled off in a big no. “I tried that here once,” he said (I’m paraphrasing). But mostly he was astonished at how America eats; it’s killing him. If he chowed down like one of us, he said, “I would be big and soft.” Wait. Everyone knows pasta makes you fat. You mean it’s really crap consumed on an irregular schedule that does it?

A disgusting little story about a guy who managed to ingest an entire 15-pound (or was it 20?) burger seemed to run everywhere. I’m as bad as everyone else in talking about behavior that abhorrent during a world food crisis. (Seen any news out of Haiti lately? They’re eating dirt.) But I bring it up only to say it made me think of a bizarre if hilarious piece of writing I turned up thanks to Popurls, by a guy who ingested way too much macaroni and cheese or something at an all-you-can-eat place and wound up having the most graphically described intestinal distress maybe in history. Suffice it to say it is beyond detailed and involves the manager of the restaurant hosing down him and the bathroom while his wife is off buying him new pants, underwear and shoes. If we’re going to celebrate gluttony in an age of understocked food pantries, there should be equal time for the crappy consequences. I will never look at a fat guy on a buffet line the same way. . . . 

When it comes to language, the fish truly does rot from the head down. Start out turning “torture” into “enhanced interrogation techniques” and before you know it “fancy” has lost its meaning. The idea of an “Un-Fancy Food” event to counter the original is totally down the rabbit hole. My friend Rolando, who actually opened a restaurant at one point to avoid the shit show that is the Javits Center in summer, has it right when he says it is all about making America fat, not about any “high-flown” or “expensive” products. For every artisanal cheese, there are 32 aisles of white chocolate-raspberry-bacon dips and crappy candies and tortured meats and seasoned-to-saccharine olives. Suffice it to say that a surprising number of attendees are in wheelchairs, and not because they are wraiths — they are too large to even waddle. The real “fancy” food had to have been down at the alt-event. 

I know people from America are very different from us, here at the center of the universe, but really, what would possess a grown man to travel to New York and parade around in a T-shirt reading: “Instant idiot — just add beer”? And how did I know he was not from around here? The shirt was size XXXL and still too small.